It’s important for researchers to look for innovative ways to help people to manage their own mental health

Marcus Munafò, Professor of Biological Psychology and Ian Penton-Voak, Professor of Evolutional Psychology at the University of Bristol talk about how their ground-breaking app, HappyPlace, helps people cope with low mood in an innovative way.

We know that traditional mental health treatments don’t always work for everyone, and it’s important for researchers to look for new, innovative ways to help people to manage their own mental health and improve their wellbeing.

As academic psychologists, we’re very interested in the role that social cognition (that is, how we perceive the social world, including the moods of other people) plays in mental health. An important part of social cognition is the ability to accurately read the emotions of other people through things like their body language and facial expressions.

Our work at the University of Bristol involves a range of techniques called ‘cognitive bias modification’, in which we train people to interpret ambiguous social signals more positively.

Research suggests that our personal situation and mood can bias the way we interpret the emotions of others. For example, if a child grows up in a hostile environment, it makes sense for them to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as threatening as a sort of psychological self-defence strategy.

Most people are very good at interpreting strong emotions, but it’s harder to detect subtle emotions in other people. People with low mood are more likely to interpret social and emotional information negatively. This can have a limiting impact on your life, stopping you from engaging with opportunities in the world.

In some cases, this self-protective instinct can be helpful, but when a person is suffering from a mental health condition, their response to such situations can become exaggerated and seriously impact on your quality of life.

There’s growing evidence that the symptoms of mild to moderate mental health conditions can be improved through training  that reset these assumptions. The HappyPlace app puts the research we’ve done in the palm of your hand.

By deciding the emotion of faces presented on a screen, some of which are easy to interpret, others of which are more ambiguous, you can train yourself to interpret social signals more positively. Using the app, you can record your progress in a mood diary and answer questionnaires to measure your improvement over time.

Whether or not you have a diagnosed mental health condition, if you experience low moods which impact on your life, you could benefit from the same techniques that are designed to improve mood in people with a mental health diagnosis.

We’re still in the early stages of research into changing social cognition, but the results so far have proved very positive and we hope that the app will help a large number of people to boost their mood and improve their quality of life.

 

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